If you live in Bath you can't get an appointment to see a National Health Service dentist. To do so you will have to travel to just outside Bristol, where you could be squeezed into one practice's jammed schedule in a month's time.

In Aberdeen you can at least be seen in your home town, but will be out of luck if your toothache is chronic; you will have to wait four weeks for an appointment.

Londoners and Liverpudlians, on the other hand, have something to smile about. They can get their ailing mouth examined next week. Networks of smart clinics are opening in cities, notably the Whitecross chain in London, Birmingham, Dudley, Bristol and Bedford, where up to 15 dentists can give NHS appointments, in some instances on the next day.

They even offer a nervous patient programme. Elsewhere, you can be seen, but not on NHS terms: increasing numbers of people are being forced to pay for their dental health care.

In other words, oral health is down to postcode. Research by Jobs & Money clearly shows huge disparities between the availability of free or subsidised dental care and it is not necessarily deprived areas which are hardest hit. What, under the founding principles of the National Health service, is supposed to be a democratic provision of equal care for all has become a lottery.

A statement made to Jobs & Money by the Department of Health clearly does not bear out our experience: "There are more dentists than ever before in the General Dental Service and most still devote most of their time to NHS work. Most people can get NHS dental treatment when they need it," says a spokeswoman. She admits that more people are turning to private care, but adds that more check-ups are being carried out on the NHS now than five years ago: 19.9m last year against 19.2m in 1996. About a quarter of NHS dental work is carried out free or at reduced cost. The maximum charge has not increased in real terms since this government took office, she says.

But where people do have to go private they pay dearly. Costs vary round the country, but even the most basic procedure is vastly more expensive - almost two and a half times - on private terms than on the NHS. In London, the Whitecross centres charge £30 for an initial private consultation, £33 for a scale and polish from a dental hygienist, £55 for a white filling and from £325 for a crown.

The only positive is that often dentists will take benefit claimants on to their books where other NHS clients are refused: if you are on income support or pregnant, dental care is totally free (although treatments costing more than £200 must be pre-approved). However, if you have dentures you may find that no one will take you on as a new patient. But the government has acknowledged the severity of the problem of patchy NHS cover: last year it published a dental strategy which made a commitment to making high-quality dentistry available to everyone regardless of where they live. It said that £100m has been earmarked for the project, which will include the establishment of 40 new NHS dental access centres.

"No one has claimed that they (the access centres) will solve the whole problem, that's why the government's strategy includes a whole range of measures, including £20m a year directly rewarding dentists' commitment to the NHS," says the spokeswoman.

But the British Dental Association says the problem is two-fold: first, dentists are not given sufficient funds by the NHS to carry out the work and second, the number of dental practices is insufficient: some have closed their books to new patients for more than two years because they cannot handle any more patients. The Association has criticised Secretary of State for Health Alan Milburn's plans, saying that much of the money being allocated has been double counted.

According to the Review Body of Doctors' and Dentists' Remuneration, a dentist who does only NHS work earns an average of £60,000 a year. But one dentist in the south-east told Jobs & Money: "This morning I spent three-quarters of an hour making a set of dentures, and my paper profit, that is not even taking my overheads into account, was £14. It's madness and something has got to change." He adds that while private dental plans mean a regular income for the dentist (see opposite), they also mean a commitment to carry out all subsequent treatments for a set fee. "You are taking on whatever problems their previous dentist has left them with and this is often not cost-effective," he says.

The Consumers' Association has already highlighted the shortfalls in the system and is currently researching the whole area of dental care provision.

But there is a separate problem emerging: the private dentists to which increasing numbers of people are having to turn are not regulated. The Care Standards Act, which came in last year, applies to all areas of private health care provision except private dentistry. This means that if you think your dentist, operating under private terms, has failed to explain charging structures clearly, or think that the work carried out is substandard, your only recourse is to sue. "More and more people are using private dental services, and not necessarily by choice. This is one area of private health care that must not be permitted to continue to operate without proper safeguards in place for patients. It's appalling that private work done by dentists is not properly regulated," says Clara Macay, principal policy adviser for the Consumers' Association.

A private members bill which would regulate dentists under the Care Standards Commission, the new private healthcare watchdog agency which is due to be established next year, is currently going through parliament.

Back to the DoH, which says: "The government wants dentistry firmly back within the NHS. That is an ambitious target, but the dental strategy shows how, by working together with the profession and the NHS, we can achieve it." If our difficulties in finding such a dentist from the long list of practices which state quite categorically that they carry out NHS work are typical, then this could take quite some time.